La Maison du Chocolat Valentine's and Easter Collection

Sorry not to have updated regularly, but here is some good news: La Maison du Chocolat's Valentine's and Easter collections!

First of all, La Maison has 4 special bonbons for Valentine's 2015.  Apparently these are developed, like, a year in advance, and initially conceived about a year before that.  Each year has a theme, and this year's is caramel:

All four were good and interesting.  My favorite, unsurprisingly, was the plain dark chocolate bonbon, sourced from a plantation in Venezuela whose beans gave a strong caramel flavor note.  Apparently, many people did a double-take, thinking there was caramel in there.  I didn't, but I did love it.

My second favorite, surprisingly, was the milk chocolate.  It has some rooibos tea and some other good stuff.  An interesting taste that was still both chocolatey and playful.

I did not get to taste the Easter design, but wow:

Check out the detail on the "leather"!  This is all carved by hand!:

Not many of these are made, and each takes a full day, done in assembly line fashion.  It's delivered to the various shops in several pieces, and then "glued" together with ganache.

Bottom Line: La Maison du Chocolat is good enough to get us blogging again.

Two Little Red Hens Brooklyn Blackout Cupcake

David has been recommending Two Little Red Hens' Brooklyn Blackout cupcake to me, and to all of you, for years. I finally made it up to the Upper East Side so I could try this much-heralded cupcake, and get a better photo of it for posterity. Here is what it actually looks like, before it has been half-eaten and smushed:



What we're looking at here is crumbled chocolate cookie atop dark chocolate frosting, which is on top of chocolate cake, which encloses chocolate pudding. I sat by myself and ate this entire thing in about seven minutes, and I felt powerful.

BOTTOM LINE: I guess the Upper East Side does have something going for it, after all.

Maison Kayser Chocolate Tart and Chocolate Mousse

Angel and I reviewed Maison Kayser when it opened in NYC, and we loved it.  We went back to the original, though there are now three other locations, and we still love it.

Angel still loved the mousse.  She still loved it more than I did, but I liked it a bit more the second time around.  I think I let her deal with most of those brownie bit things on top this time.  

The tart, though, was steller.  Perhaps a bit too much crust -- as is often the case with mini-tarts -- but that is easily ignored.  It's an intensely chocolatey experience.

Bottom Line: This place is really great, and everyone should go there.  Period.

La Maison du Chocolat's Chocolate Mousse and Bonbons

La Maison du Chocolat makes chocolate mousse:

Now, as we know, La Maison du Chocolat does everything well.  This is an exception only in that it is good even for La Maison du Chocolat.  Definitely one of the top-5 chocolate mousses in NYC.  Woo.

So, while there, Angel and I got into an argument.  I insisted that the best bon bon there was the Caracas -- Venezuelan origin.  Angel insisted it was Akasambo -- Ghana origin.  We had both tried both, and both liked both -- these are two of the best bon bons in NYC -- but we were both EXTREMELY insistent.  So we did a blind taste test.

I predicted the result perfectly: we each preferred the other's pick.

Importantly, her taste set had Caracas first and mine had Akasambo first.  Now this actually gave me a thought.  I think, in chocolate taste tests, the first items tasted have an unfair advantage.  Because when you first taste a piece of chocolate, you're like, "CHOCOLATE!!!"  But then when you second taste a piece of chocolate and have to compare them, maybe you are like, "How can anything compare to that?"  And then you eat it and you are like, "Oh wait, that is good.  Hmmm...."  But then you remember "CHOCOLATE!!!" and then pick that because your second reaction was not as excited.

Bottom Line: Chocolate NYC: we have some theories.  Usually they are better thought out than this.  But great mousse!

This thing from Good Health Cafe

I ordered from Good Health Cafe on Seamless.  I ordered a vegan "chocolate mousse cake."  I got this:

Embarassingly, it was actually pretty delicious.  But it was definitely not mousse cake.

Bottom Line: It loses one or two points for the inaccurate name and sloppy presentation, but at the end of the day it is surprisingly passable.

Ciao Bella

There are a lot of tiers of ice cream/gelato, at least in terms of pretentiousness.  Ciao Bella is not at the top tier, probably because it is not sufficiently "artisanal."  It is a chain.  And it is sold (*gasp*) at grocery stores

But if you stop by the convenient Ciao Bella counter in the Grand Central Dining Concourse, there is really no way to distinguish its beautiful offerings from those of the more artisanal gelaterias.  And tastewise, I think Ciao Bella holds its own with just about anything, easily outpacing any other store-bought offerings.

My favorite item at Ciao Bella is the dark chocolate sorbet.  You need to be a sorbet person.  Many aren't.  But the real advantage is that it's just so much more chocolatey than gelato or ice cream, because those necessarily uses dairy.

On my most recent trip, I was thirsty, so I decided to mix it up and got an iced green tea float with the chocolate sorbet.  I made an amateur mistake, though, in getting the medium rather than the small.  They put in the same one scoop of sorbet with extra green tea, diluting the chocolatiness.  However, by the time I got to the more chocolatey bottom, the drink was absolutely hitting the spot.

My friend got a cup of cookies and cream and mocha gelatos.  Neither is really my style for obvious reasons, but both involved chocolate and were good versions of what they are.

Bottom Line: Easily the best stuff you can buy in a store and conveniently located in Grand Central

Maison Kayser

Stop two on Angel and my chocolate quest was Maison Kayser -- the first NYC outpost of a major Paris chain.  We should have just come here -- it was great.  Unfortunately, I was pretty full from the previous mediocre experience, so I probably didn't get a full appreciation of all that Maison Kayser had to offer.  But it should be noted that not only do they have a great selection of chocolatey and other baked wares, but they also have an appealing regular food menu.

We ordered a chocolate mousse, a chocolate madeleine, and a cake with a very complicated name that shed little light as to what it was like.

This cake had a name.

That cake was a highlight.  For some reason we assumed it would come out hot, but it was cold.  No matter.  Very chocolatey, very delicious.

Next up was the mousse.  I liked it, but Angel liked it more, noting the high quality and feeling it compared well to other mousses in the city.  I think the chocolatey thingies on top had more appeal to her.  To me they just sort of interfered with the texture and didn't add much chocolate flavor.

I feel like that paragraph came out a bit too negative on my part.  The mousse was very good.  Really.

Finally, we had a chocolate madeleine.  But we did not get a picture of it, because Angel's camera died.  I should probably point out that I might not be qualified to review this madeleine, as I'm not sure I've ever had a madeleine before.  In any case, I immediately declared that it was not chocolatey enough.  "What are you talking about??" demanded Angel. "This is almost like a brownie!!"  "But then," I responded, "why did we not just get a brownie?"  So there you have it: very chocolatey for a madeleine, but maybe you should just get a brownie.

Bottom Line: I can see why this is a successful chain in Paris.  It is a successful chain in Paris, because it is really good at various different things.

Two Little Red Hens

Two Little Red Hens might be the best bakery in New York City.  They do everything really well, from scones to cheesecakes.  And yes, even chocolate.  Their Brooklyn Blackout Cupcake is my favorite cupcake in the city (and they make full Brooklyn Blackout Cakes, for those of you who are Shaquille O'Neal).

If this looks appetizing to you, you belong here.

The problem with Two Little Red Hens is that I do not live near it.  So I basically have to beg anyone sojourning to the Upper East Side to pick this up for me whenever I find such an adventurous spirit.  Unfortunately, what comes back to me does not always look as beautiful as I promise it does in the shop:

Seriously, guys, the shop is one of the most beautiful, adorable places in the city.

This cupcake was smushed in transit and then put in the fridge before I was able to rescue it.  And you know what?  It was still just about the best dang cupcake I'd ever had.  Among the reasons why: 1) It is a really chocolatey cupcake; 2) Inside of the chocolatey cupcake they put gooey chocolate; 3) I don't even need a number three, just eat it.

Bottom Line: Despite all appearances in my photos, this is the best cupcake.